BOOK OF THE DAMNED 115 



Shoemaking and celestiality. 



It is so easy to say that axes, or wedge-shaped stones found on 

 the ground, were there in the first place, and that it is only coinci- 

 dence that lightning should strike near one but the credibility of 

 coincidences decreases as the square root of their volume, I think. 

 Our massed instances speak too much of coincidences of coincidences. 

 But the axes, or wedge-shaped objects that have been found in trees 

 are more difficult for orthodoxy. For instance, Arago accepts that 

 such finds have occurred, but he argues that, if wedge-shaped stones 

 have been found in tree trunks, so have toads been found in tree 

 trunks did the toads fall there? 



Not at all bad for a hypnotic. 



Of course, in our acceptance, the Irish are the Chosen People. It's 

 because they are characteristically best in accord with the under- 

 lying essence of quasi-existence. M. Arago answers a question by 

 asking another question. That's the only way a question can be an- 

 swered in our Hibernian kind of an existence. 



Dr. Bodding argued with the natives of the Santal Parganas, In- 

 dia, who said that cut and shaped stones had fallen from the sky, 

 some of them lodging in tree trunks. Dr. Bodding, with orthodox 

 notions of velocity of falling bodies, having missed, I suppose, some 

 of the notes I have upon large hailstones, which, for size, have fallen 

 with astonishingly low velocity, argued that anything falling from 

 the sky would be "smashed to atoms." He accepts that objects of 

 worked stone have been found in tree trunks, but he explains : 



That the Santals often steal trees, but do not chop them down in 

 the usual way, because that would be to make too much noise: they 

 insert stone wedges, and hammer them instead: then, if they should 

 be caught, wedges would not be the evidence against them that axes 

 would be. 



Or that a scientific man can't be desperate and reasonable too. 



Or that a pickpocket, for instance, is safe, though caught with his 

 hand in one's pocket, if he's gloved, say: because no court in the 

 land would regard a gloved hand in the same way in which a bare 

 hand would be regarded. 



That there's nothing but intermediateness to the rational and the 

 preposterous: that this status of our own ratiocinations is percepti- 

 ble wherein they are upon the unfamiliar. 



Dr. Bodding collected 50 of these shaped stones, said to have 

 fallen from the sky, in the course of many years. He says that the 

 Santals are a highly developed race, and for ages have not used 



